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<h2> CHAPTER LXXVI. </h2>
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<p>We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii (the crooked road making
the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the journey very much. We
were more than a week making the trip, because our Kanaka horses would not
go by a house or a hut without stopping—whip and spur could not
alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it economized
time to let them have their way. Upon inquiry the mystery was explained:
the natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never pass a house
without stopping to swap news, and consequently their horses learn to
regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the whole duty of man,
and his salvation not to be compassed without it. However, at a former
crisis of my life I had once taken an aristocratic young lady out driving,
behind a horse that had just retired from a long and honorable career as
the moving impulse of a milk wagon, and so this present experience awoke a
reminiscent sadness in me in place of the exasperation more natural to the
occasion. I remembered how helpless I was that day, and how humiliated;
how ashamed I was of having intimated to the girl that I had always owned
the horse and was accustomed to grandeur; how hard I tried to appear easy,
and even vivacious, under suffering that was consuming my vitals; how
placidly and maliciously the girl smiled, and kept on smiling, while my
hot blushes baked themselves into a permanent blood-pudding in my face;
how the horse ambled from one side of the street to the other and waited
complacently before every third house two minutes and a quarter while I
belabored his back and reviled him in my heart; how I tried to keep him
from turning corners and failed; how I moved heaven and earth to get him
out of town, and did not succeed; how he traversed the entire settlement
and delivered imaginary milk at a hundred and sixty-two different
domiciles, and how he finally brought up at a dairy depot and refused to
budge further, thus rounding and completing the revealment of what the
plebeian service of his life had been; how, in eloquent silence, I walked
the girl home, and how, when I took leave of her, her parting remark
scorched my soul and appeared to blister me all over: she said that my
horse was a fine, capable animal, and I must have taken great comfort in
him in my time—but that if I would take along some milk-tickets next
time, and appear to deliver them at the various halting places, it might
expedite his movements a little. There was a coolness between us after
that.</p>
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<p>In one place in the island of Hawaii, we saw a laced and ruffled cataract
of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred feet high;
but that sort of scenery finds its stanchest ally in the arithmetic rather
than in spectacular effect. If one desires to be so stirred by a poem of
Nature wrought in the happily commingled graces of picturesque rocks,
glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights and shadows, and
failing water, that the tears almost come into his eyes so potent is the
charm exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an
experience. The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on the Erie railway,
is an example. It would recede into pitiable insignificance if the callous
tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the honors
simply on scenic grace and beauty—the grand, the august and the
sublime being barred the contest—it could challenge the old world
and the new to produce its peer.</p>
<p>In one locality, on our journey, we saw some horses that had been born and
reared on top of the mountains, above the range of running water, and
consequently they had never drank that fluid in their lives, but had been
always accustomed to quenching their thirst by eating dew-laden or
shower-wetted leaves. And now it was destructively funny to see them sniff
suspiciously at a pail of water, and then put in their noses and try to
take a bite out of the fluid, as if it were a solid. Finding it liquid,
they would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling, snorting and
showing other evidences of fright. When they became convinced at last that
the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust in their noses up to
their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water, and proceeded to chew it
complacently. We saw a man coax, kick and spur one of them five or ten
minutes before he could make it cross a running stream. It spread its
nostrils, distended its eyes and trembled all over, just as horses
customarily do in the presence of a serpent—and for aught I know it
thought the crawling stream was a serpent.</p>
<p>In due course of time our journey came to an end at Kawaehae (usually
pronounced To-a-hi—and before we find fault with this elaborate
orthographical method of arriving at such an unostentatious result, let us
lop off the ugh from our word "though"). I made this horseback trip on a
mule. I paid ten dollars for him at Kau (Kah-oo), added four to get him
shod, rode him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen dollars. I
mark the circumstance with a white stone (in the absence of chalk—for
I never saw a white stone that a body could mark anything with, though out
of respect for the ancients I have tried it often enough); for up to that
day and date it was the first strictly commercial transaction I had ever
entered into, and come out winner. We returned to Honolulu, and from
thence sailed to the island of Maui, and spent several weeks there very
pleasantly. I still remember, with a sense of indolent luxury, a picnicing
excursion up a romantic gorge there, called the Iao Valley. The trail lay
along the edge of a brawling stream in the bottom of the gorge—a
shady route, for it was well roofed with the verdant domes of forest
trees. Through openings in the foliage we glimpsed picturesque scenery
that revealed ceaseless changes and new charms with every step of our
progress. Perpendicular walls from one to three thousand feet high guarded
the way, and were sumptuously plumed with varied foliage, in places, and
in places swathed in waving ferns. Passing shreds of cloud trailed their
shadows across these shining fronts, mottling them with blots; billowy
masses of white vapor hid the turreted summits, and far above the vapor
swelled a background of gleaming green crags and cones that came and went,
through the veiling mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the
cloudy curtain descended till half the canon wall was hidden, then
shredded gradually away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front
appeared through it—then swept aloft and left it glorified in the
sun again. Now and then, as our position changed, rocky bastions swung out
from the wall, a mimic ruin of castellated ramparts and crumbling towers
clothed with mosses and hung with garlands of swaying vines, and as we
moved on they swung back again and hid themselves once more in the
foliage. Presently a verdure-clad needle of stone, a thousand feet high,
stepped out from behind a corner, and mounted guard over the mysteries of
the valley. It seemed to me that if Captain Cook needed a monument, here
was one ready made—therefore, why not put up his sign here, and sell
out the venerable cocoanut stump?</p>
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<p>But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala—which
means, translated, "the house of the sun." We climbed a thousand feet up
the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next
day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit,
where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night. With the
first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us. Mounted
on a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent wonders. The
sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface seeming only
wrinkled and dimpled in the distance. A broad valley below appeared like
an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar plantations alternating
with dun squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished to mossy
tufts. Beyond the valley were mountains picturesquely grouped together;
but bear in mind, we fancied that we were looking up at these things—not
down. We seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl ten thousand
feet deep, with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away into the sky
above us! It was curious; and not only curious, but aggravating; for it
was having our trouble all for nothing, to climb ten thousand feet toward
heaven and then have to look up at our scenery. However, we had to be
content with it and make the best of it; for, all we could do we could not
coax our landscape down out of the clouds. Formerly, when I had read an
article in which Poe treated of this singular fraud perpetrated upon the
eye by isolated great altitudes, I had looked upon the matter as an
invention of his own fancy.</p>
<p>I have spoken of the outside view—but we had an inside one, too.
That was the yawning dead crater, into which we now and then tumbled
rocks, half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw them go
careering down the almost perpendicular sides, bounding three hundred feet
at a jump; kicking up cast-clouds wherever they struck; diminishing to our
view as they sped farther into distance; growing invisible, finally, and
only betraying their course by faint little puffs of dust; and coming to a
halt at last in the bottom of the abyss, two thousand five hundred feet
down from where they started! It was magnificent sport. We wore ourselves
out at it.</p>
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<p>The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about a
thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of Kilauea is
somewhat deeper, and ten miles in circumference. But what are either of
them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala? I will not offer any
figures of my own, but give official ones—those of Commander Wilkes,
U.S.N., who surveyed it and testifies that it is twenty-seven miles in
circumference! If it had a level bottom it would make a fine site for a
city like London. It must have afforded a spectacle worth contemplating in
the old days when its furnaces gave full rein to their anger.</p>
<p>Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and
the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing
squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly
together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean—not
a vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the rim of the
crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a ghostly
procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted through a
chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and gathered and sunk
and blended together till the abyss was stored to the brim with a fleecy
fog). Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. Clear to the
horizon, league on league, the snowy floor stretched without a break—not
level, but in rounded folds, with shallow creases between, and with here
and there stately piles of vapory architecture lifting themselves aloft
out of the common plain—some near at hand, some in the middle
distances, and others relieving the monotony of the remote solitudes.
There was little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech. I
felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in
mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world.</p>
<p>While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection
appeared in the East. A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon the
sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy
light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling
the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor- palaces and
cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of
rich coloring.</p>
<p>It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory of
it will remain with me always.</p>
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